Maps and Topography

06/11/2013

After months of speculation, the fate of Waze, the social-mapping-location-data startup, is finally decided: Google isbuying the company, giving the search giant a social boost to its already-strong mapping and mobile businesses.

Speculation has had the sale at $1 billion to $1.3 billion, and so far there is no price on the deal, but a source tells TechCrunch that it was done for $1.1 billion.

Update: Waze has also published a blog post on the acquisition. In it, CEO Noam Bardin writes that CEO Larry Page, Google GEO VP Brian McClendon and the Google Maps teams. Bardin said.

“We are excited about the prospect of working with the Google Maps team to enhance our search capabilities and to join them in their ongoing efforts to build the best map of the world.”

Bardin also notes.

“Nothing practical will change, with the company, now pushing 50 million users, we will maintain our community, brand, service and organization.”

He also raises the subject of why Waze decided to sell. Bardin says that it was motivated by the fact that an IPO appeared the route that would take the company more into being focused on returns and less on growing as a product for users.

“Choosing the path of an IPO often shifts attention to bankers, lawyers and the happiness of Wall Street, and we decided we’d rather spend our time with you, the Waze community.”

Of course, the burden of getting a return on the investment now become’s Google’s, but as you can see below there are a number of reasons why it would buy Waze, anyway. [original post continues below]

Update 2: Israeli tech blog GeekTime also confirms our $1.1 billion figure, “of which $1.03B will be transferred in cash directly to the company and its stockholders. An additional $100M will be awarded to employees based on performance.”

This is a doubly strategic move for Google. The purchase comes in the wake of what appeared to be failed negotiations between the Israel-based startup two big rivals of the search giant:

The news comes after a particularly heated few days in which reports of Google’s interest in Waze reached new heights, after first surfacing two weeks ago. In the wildfire that is internet publishing, many even went so far as to report it as a done deal, making things even more confusing.

Waze had raised some $67 million in funding from Blue Run Ventures, Magma, Vertex, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Horizon Ventures. And it looks like the majority of the payout in the sale will go to these VCs. Globes, the Israeli business newspaper that first reported the latest interest from Google, estimated that payouts to co-founders — Ehud Shabtai, Amir and Gili Shinar, Uri Levine, Arie Gillon — and its CEO Noam Bardin, will be under $200 million in total.

There are at least a couple of places where you can see Google making use of Waze data.

Social. Under CEO Larry Page, Google has been especially bullish on where it positions itself on social, which it has been hinging on Google+ as a kind of web across all of its other properties to show you, the user, what those you know are doing, and also to let your connections see what you are looking at online.Taking a page from Facebook’s book, the thinking goes that this helps with discovery and engagement.

Waze, as a crowdsourced location platform, would give Google an additional, very mobile-based angle on this concept, letting users not just share places (i.e. sites) visited on the web, but actual places visited physically. As Bardim noted at the AllThingsD conference in April,

“What search is for the web, maps are for mobile.”

By this, he means that most of the searches you do on mobile have to do with location, and Waze is one of the few companies out there that is bringing that kind of search together with actual map data and a social layer. (The NYT ran an interesting piece yesterday with one mapping company describing how maps on mobile specifically become a “canvas” for all other apps.)

Competition. Waze could be a two-pronged fork for Google:

On one hand, it gives the search giant nice, healthy wedge into the mass of consumers who are already using the app on iOS devices.

Gives Google a way of roadblocking how companies like Facebook could use Waze’s assets, if reports are to be believed.

As the startup likes to point out, it’s not a mapping company, but a big data player. Facebook, making its own big push on mobile, would have been a natural home for a socially-focused company like Waze, which also happens to be one of the few home-grown mapping databases around. This will mean that Facebook will need to have to continue to use third-party data for its own location-based searches and information, or less look to acquire elsewhere.

(Now could be a good time to wonder whether Nokia might consider offloading Navteq, its loss-making but strategic mapping asset, to shore up its financial position…)

It’s interesting, in any case, that Google and Waze have now kissed and made up. It was only in April that Bardin jabbed at Google when talking about who the big players in mapping were and how Waze stacks up against them: Waze used to benchmark itself with Google, he noted at the AllThingsD conference, but after the search giant cut off access to its API, Waze started to benchmark to Navteq.

When the Facebook acquisition reports surfaced, we’d heard that one of the sticking points was that Waze wanted to keep its R&D in Israel, while Facebook was leaning to a Menlo Park relocation. Since then, others have told us that this was just smoke and mirrors and that there were other reasons the deal fell through (Mountain View’s most famous resident being one possible factor). Google, unlike Facebook, has a decent presence in the country, including a new hub for startups started in December 2012, Campus Tel Aviv.

Google today made it clear that it would keep Waze’s operations going in Israel — for now, at least. Brian McClendon, Google’s VP of Geo, noted in the blog post announcing the deal.

“The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”

In any case, it makes sense that Waze might want to keep its Israel-based operations intact. Just about all of the company’s 110-or-so employees are there, with only around 10 in a very modest office in Palo Alto, just down the street from another big-data startup, Palantir. That small proportion, however, is mighty: regular workers there include CEO Noam Bardin and Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s VP of platform and partnerships.

The U.S. is currently Waze’s largest single market — in April, Bardin noted that 12 million of its (at the time) 44 million users are based there — and this is where the company is putting its growth efforts for now, too. In February of this year, Waze expanded its U.S. operations, and its monetization ambitions, by opening an office on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising world in New York City, and we’ve seen that members of the team have been visiting New York recently. There is still a lot of development to be done on the advertising front — and given Google’s pole position in online and mobile advertising, that would give Waze another obvious fit with its new owner.

Ironically, the news comes as Google continues to fight other kinds of fires on the mapping front. In the U.S. it is trying to get a ruling overturned that it violated federal wiretap laws with its StreetView services.

In Europe, Google recently offered up a settlement in a search antitrust suit, originally brought by travel and mapping companies, that claimed Google, the biggest search engine in Europe by a longshot, was giving its own mapping and travel results more preference in search results over those of its competitors, making business untenable for smaller players. In that ongoing case, the EU competition regulator Joachin Almunia said at the end of May that Google still needed to make more concessions.

COMMENTARY: In a blog post dated May 9, 2013, I commented on rumors that Facebook was in discussions to acquire Waze. It now appears that there may have been some truth to those rumors. I am glad that Google acquired the young startup. It will make a tremendous addition to Google Maps, and once it is integrated with Google+, will boost the user experience and give it bragging rights over Facebook.

As rumored, iOS 7 has a less skeuomorphic look, with a more flat design and lots of whites tinged with color. That doesn't mean, however, that the new iOS is free from gradient or panache. Instead, it's a more modern take on what makes iOS iOS.

Control Center

New in iOS 7 is a Control Center. It's an area that can be activated from within any app that brings control to Wi-Fi, brightness and other frequently accessed settings.

From Control Center you can access a flashlight, start a song, toggle AirPlay and more.

Multitasking

iOS 7 will bring better multitasking and background processing to all apps. It will monitor which apps you use frequently to help determine which ones need more full-functioning multitasking. When apps send push notifications, for instance, the phone will know to start to give that app background processing so that it will work more quickly and intuitively.

Apple has taken a major cue from webOS (RIP) and added full-previews of running apps for multitasking. No more tiny icons!

AirDrop will only work on iOS devices running the latest wireless chipsets, meaning the iPhone 5, fourth generation iPad, iPad mini, and the latest iPod touch.

Photos and Camera

The Camera and Photo apps received a major overhaul. Not only is it easier to manage large numbers of photographs, users can now create Shared Photostreams — think group albums — into which other users can post photos as well as share with others.

Users can also share video with iCloud Photostreams in iOS 7.

Visually, the app looks similar to the latest Flickr redesign, is less focused on 4 x 4 grids of thumbnails, and offers users a better look at their photographs.

Music and iTunes Radio

The Music app gets the same visual overhaul as the rest of the system but the big feature with music and iOS 7 is iTunes Radio. Think of it as a hybrid between Pandora and Songza, built into iOS.

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Users can listen to theme-centric playlists or stations ("Songs for summer") or listen to artist-centric stations. And, like Last.fm, iTunes Radio keeps track of all the stuff you listen to across iTunes, Apple TV and on iOS 7.

It's free with ads, though iTunes Match subscribers get it free without ads.

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Safari

Safari for iOS 7 has a new look and feel — more similar to Chrome on iOS, we must say — including a new tabbed view. It also integrates with iCloud Keychain for password management.

The unified search menu, which was removed with iOS 3.0, is back. There is also access to shared links and the reading list improvements shown off with OS X Mavericks.

Tabs are now 3D and fully integrated with iCloud tabs. Users are no longer limited to eight tabs (hooray) and tabs can be reordered or removed with a swipe.

Siri

Siri has a new look and a new voice. Users can choose between male and female voices for Siri. Siri is also getting smarter: It will now pull in data from Twitter, Wikipedia and Bing.

iOS in the Car

Apple is going to bring iOS to the dashboard of your car. Support for iOS in the car will be coming to Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Chevy, Kia, Volvo, Acura and others.

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New App Store

The App Store has a new design and will show apps that are popular nearby, as well as apps popular with your friends. The best part? Your apps now update automatically.

More

Notification Sync

Audio-only Facetime

Weibo Integration in China

Per-app VPN for Enterprise

Plus more than 1500 APIs, support for third-party game controllers, new multitasking APIs.

Apple is also introducing a feature called Activation Lock, which will prevent a thieves from activating your iPhone on another network unless they know your iCloud password.

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Coming This Fall

Developers will have access to iOS 7 on Monday and it will hit iOS devices this fall.

COMMENTARY: Love the sharing of photos and integration with Twitter, the notifications center and bar (soial updates, messages, email, etc.), launching of apps within SIRI (voice activated, of course) and partnerships with Yelp (restaurant reviews), RottenTomatoes (movies) and OpenTable (reservations), improved iMessages, iMaps (and integraton within SIRI), addition of SIRI to the iPad, automatic integration with iCloud for all your digital content (music, images, films and eBooks), integraton of the Facebook app and Apple Store within iOS 7, and the improved Safari browser which looks like Chrome which includes tabs. The expansion of different languages for SIRI. Most of the changes improve the user experience, but there I didn't find anything that is earth shaking or disruptive.

05/09/2013

Facebook has approached Waze, the social mapping and traffic app maker, and is now in advanced due dilligence on a deal that Calcalist puts at between $800 million and $1 billion.

Facebook appears to be close to makinganother billion-dollar acquisition to once again ramp up its mobile efforts: according to three reports in the Israeli press at Calcalist and sister publication Ynet and The Marker(all in Hebrew), Facebook has approached Waze, the social mapping and traffic app maker, and is now in advanced due dilligence on a deal that Calcalist puts at between $800 million and $1 billion. The negotiations between the social network and crowdsourced mapping app apparently began six months ago.

Click Image To Visit Waze Homepage

We have been digging too and have picked up confirmation from a source that both sides have privately confirmed that the deal is happening, and that the pricing reported first by the Calcalist is accurate. The main issue right now, the source said, is whether to keep Waze in Israel or take it to the U.S., as Facebook did with two previous Israel acqusitions. Those were of feature phone interface developer Snaptu (bought for up to $70 million in March 2011) and facial recognition specialist Face.com (bought in June 2012 for $50-60 million).

But! Facebook and Waze have already come back to us with flat non-responses. “We do not comment on rumors or speculation about the business,” a spokesperson at Waze told TechCrunch. The company tells me that it currently has over 47 million active users — more than double what it had in July last year when it reported 20 million.

“We won’t comment on speculation,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

However, if the rumors are true, adding Waze to Facebook makes a lot of sense in some respects: Facebook has been putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, which now has 751 million monthly active users as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year. That puts mobile on a faster track at the moment than Facebook’s desktop business, which currently has 1.11 billion MAUs, an increase of 23% year-over-year.

Waze Community page provides news feed from Facebook and Twitter plus place for reporting mapping technical issues and traffic reports from users (Click Image To Enlarge)

The most recent of its movements on mobile services is Facebook Home, an Android-based launcher that lets a user embed a connection into their Facebook social graph across their entire mobile experience with services like the ever-present Chat Heads. On another track, Facebook has for years now been building up a business around location-based check-ins, which also include local deals. A service like Waze, with social networking and crowdsourcing of information part of its DNA, fits perfectly into that landscape.

This would not be Facebook’s first 10-figure acquisition in the mobile space. Just over one year ago, leading up to its IPO, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, a deal that had a large portion in stock and ended up being worth more like $747 million when it finally got approved. That, too, gave Facebook a big leap into mobile services: while Instagram these days also has a handy way of viewing profiles on the desktop web, at its heart it is a wildly popular mobile app that for many works as a social network in its own right.

Nor would this be the first time that Waze has been in the crosshairs of acquisition rumors. One deal that was hotly reported by many, including us, involved Apple buying the mapping company. Of course that ended up not happening, although the two clearly were talking a lot because Waze ended up being a significant part of Apple Maps. The startup has raised $67 million in VC funding from backers including Kleiner Perkins, BlueRun Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, and Li Ka-shing.

Facebook earlier this year reported that it passed 1 billion users, and it’s likely that the next billion will not be in the U.S. Waze has around one-third of its users in the U.S. with the rest worldwide. Facebook’s past acquisition of another Israeli startup, Snaptu, which develops services for feature phones, was another deal that helped the social network tackle the burgeoning population of mobile users in developing markets; Waze, however, would help the company take aim specifically at smartphone users.

While Waze’s R&D is in Israel, its U.S. offices, and its CEO Noam Bardin, are based in (Facebook’s old haunt) Palo Alto, where the firm recently redecorated its front window.

COMMENTARY: It looks like Facebook is serious about mobile by improving the mobile experience for its mobile users, as they make the shift from the desktop to mobile devices. This acquisition, if true, raises the bar another notch in the social media wars, and presents another platform for placing Facebook mobile ads.

03/27/2013

SOMEONE HACKED ALMOST HALF A MILLION DEVICES AROUND THE WORLD. WHY? THEY WANTED TO SEE WHAT THE INTERNET LOOKED LIKE.

It wasn’t malicious. The file itself was the size of a small JPEG. It was given the absolute lowest priority. And it was set to self-destruct if anything went wrong. But this small file allowed one single hacker to measure the Internet activity of nearly half a million connected devices around the world, then share the results with everyone.

"I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time."

How was this even possible? The "hacker" barely hacked anything. In reality, they gained access to all these systems because each had the default "root" set as a password. (Note: Always change the password on your router!) With this access in hand, they ran several tests focusing on Internet structure and activity. And what they created from all this data is a spectacular map that captures a day in the life of the Internet (and all of its users).

Hacker's Internet Map of the World (Click Image To Enlarge)

The red represents peak traffic and the blue represents base traffic. The creator points out that night affects the U.S. and Europe less than other areas, due to the amount of omnipresent Internet connections (mostly routers and set-top boxes). Another interesting anomaly is that Europeans seem to reach peek usage right before the sun goes down, as if they’re cramming in a lot of work (or casual browsing) at the end of the work day.

No doubt, the general ethics of the study will likely turn some of you off. But given that most people who hack computers on this scale are filling it with devastating malware, I think we can let this anonymous data spelunker slide.

COMMENTARY: In 2004, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin did a presentation about Google Search at TED Monterey, California. Part of that presentation was a real-time visualization of Google Search transactions happening on every part of the globe. They called it the Genesis of Google. This kind of reminds me of what the hacker in the above article did by mapping the Inteernet. Here's the LINK.

07/28/2012

AND IF FRIENDS ARE RUNNING LATE, YOU CAN SEND A REQUEST TO FIND OUT WHERE THEY ARE WITHOUT HAVING TO MAKE A PHONE CALL.

We all have GPSs in our pockets, but there’s no good way to share a fundamental piece of information: where we’re at. Google Latitude feels invasive, broadcasting our coordinates all the time. (Your blind date needs to meet you for dinner, not follow you home afterward.) And Foursquare just feels kind of pointless. (Unless you care that I’M EATING SUSHI RIGHT NOW RIGHT HERE, AND I DO IT MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE!!)

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Tehula ($1) is a new iPhone app that can ask where your friends are with the touch of a button. The request is sent via text message, and even if they don’t have the app or even an iPhone, all your friend needs to do is click a link to share their coordinates.

Tehula developer Adrien Friggeri explains.

“The basic premise is that we’ve all been confronted with situations where we are waiting for someone, they run late, and usually what follows is a mix of phone calls to ask them where they are, and them looking for a street sign or struggling with their GPS app while on speaker phone. This is broken.”

Testing the app, I found the experience satisfyingly barebones. Requesting a friend’s location is as simple as snagging their name from your address book. A log screen keeps track of whether or not they’ve texted back, in case you miss the push notification.

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Their precise location appears through the Google Maps API, allowing you to pinpoint the position easily. (Another great feature I suggested was guessing the address or allowing me to map my path to this location--as of now, this shared location information is merely a zoomable graphic. Interestingly enough, this is planned for the app’s next version release.)

Tehula also addresses user concerns at its core.

Accessibility - It’s smart enough to circumvent a core problem of its own growth, allowing only one side of the conversation to have the app for it to work.

Privacy Protection - And issues of privacy--the most worrisome part of sharing our GPS coordinates--are addressed on the same page from which a new user shares their location. Tehula doesn’t store or sell any of your information.

In fact, the idea is so simple, firing off a URL in a text message to check a phone’s location through its browser, that you’ll wonder why more apps (and even phones!) haven’t built this functionality into their core. Because it’s not such an unreasonable question, is it? Where are you at?

COMMENTARY: I like cute products like this, but they are a one-trick pony that do one thing, and one thing only, very well, will it catch-on sufficiently to make money for the developer? This is not Angry Birds or Instagram, but can it. Are there enough users out there who really need to know where their friends are on-the-fly? Is this a must-have app? I don't think so.

05/12/2012

USING ALGORITHMS, A TEAM OF STUDENTS ANALYZED THE CLUSTERS OF PLACES THAT LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE FLOCK TO.

Every city is filled with different neighborhoods, but often, you won’t find these places on any map. They’re word-of-mouth zoning distinctions known only to locals. The boundaries are vague and arbitrary, based as much upon the way people eat and dress as real estate prices and income per capita.

Yet if these areas are distinctive to city culture, is there a way that we could measure them and analyze them--map them--scientifically?

Livehood 1 - New York Metropolitan Market - Character

A team of students (Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz) and professors (Jason I. Hong and Norman Sadeh) from Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile Commerce Lab has done just that. Their research project is called Livehoods, which analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. The team tells Co.Design.

“Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of ‘social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them. For example, if the algorithm notices that the people that visit a local bar are the same people that visit a nearby restaurant, these two places will be more likely to be grouped together.”

As more and more people and places are analyzed, Livehoods clusters this data into what becomes a collection of distinctive neighborhoods--places filled with people who enjoy going to the same restaurants, coffee shops, and music venues. And as calculating as the approach could seem, Livehoods’ scientific basis makes it extremely valuable as a social artifact: It defines local culture without the inherent judgement that comes along with human stereotyping.

Livehood 1 - New York Metropolitan Market - Stats

With this scientific methodology in mind, the Livehoods team cross-checked their own findings of Pittsburgh with 27 resident interviews. What they found--the full results which will be shared in a paper presented this June--was “compelling evidence” neighborhoods as Livehood algorithms had defined them had “real social meaning to people in the city.” In other words, the digital map lined up with many residents’ own mental maps.

All of this said, Livehoods aren’t a perfect snapshot of humanity just yet. The datasets mined for the project are limited by the perspective of Foursquare users. A lot of us don’t use Foursquare (with a strong skew toward older adults, most likely). The team explains.

“Our technique, however, is agnostic to the specific source of the data, so as we get better, less biased sources of data, we should be able to produce more accurate views of the city.”

The young researchers also fear that we may take their boundaries a bit too literally. As much as Livehoods works to clarify invisible distinctions, the team, paradoxically, points out that these distinctions are more subtle than we might expect.

They write.

“In reality, neighborhoods tend to blend into one another.”

In which case, may I suggest a simple UI tweak? Maybe Livehoods should be rendered in gradients.

Livehood 40 - San Francisco Bay Area - Character

Livehood 17 - City and County of San Francisco - Stats

COMMENTARY: The type of location-based data visualization that the students at Carnegie Mellon are conducting is not all that new. In a blog post dated October 14, 2010, I commented on a location-based iPhone app from WeePlaces that also uses check-in data compiled from foursquare to create very revealing geodemographic maps of singles hotspots in the Manhattan and adjoining vicinities. However, having been a foursquare user, it is possible check into a merchant without actually being physically there. Users do this all the time to earn points towards foursquare badges. This could give false data about how many people actually frequent a particular merchant or hotspot. A better barometer are comments made by individuals that have actually visited a check-in spot. Having said this, users should always try visiting spots themselves to determine if they are really popular among actual visitors or individuals just checking in.

03/27/2012

In the 1960s, this was the procedure for taking satellite photos of Earth: 1. Launch satellite. 2. Satellite automatically takes photos on film. 3. Satellite ejects completed roll of film which falls into the Pacific. 4. Air Force attempts to catch canister mid-fall. Failing that, Navy recovers it from the ocean.

I tell you this story to bring into focus the quotidian miracle that is Google Maps’ satellite view. Paul Rademachersays.

"We don’t usually stop and marvel at it. We only run across it while accomplishing some other task. When we’re looking up driving directions or some place we just heard about on the news, the imagery is secondary. This is why he made Stratocam".

The site is built on top of the Google Maps API, but to emphasize the images, the interface has been stripped down. You can advance back and forth through a slide show of images others have found, you can up or down vote what you see and you can navigate anywhere on the planet to take a snapshot of your own. Rademacher says the biggest challenge was finding a good balance of simplicity and features.

"The site is a sit-back slideshow, but also a voting game, and a still-photography app."

Click Images To Enlarge

The best shots are surprisingly zoomed in--views you’d likely never find in your own random browsing. Superficially, the project invites comparison to Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth from Above. Both projects share a perspective. Both tend to be attracted to the same types of subjects--there’s a lot of striking patterns, industrial and exotic landscapes.

For my money, Stratocam has more in common with Jon Rafman’s The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. Like Nine Eyes, Stratocam divorces the moment of framing from the moment of capture in photography. Automated processes capture the images, but it’s not until people come along and decide which to emphasize and which parts to ignore that we begin to see an artist’s eye. Rademacher says.

"The Google Maps satellite image is a single photograph that stretches over the entire globe. Thousands of people could pore over it and still not discover every highlight."

So far, people have contributed over 10,000 shots.

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Stratocam is part of a larger obsession with maps for Rademacher. He says.

"I love maps because they’re the connection between an abstract concept and the real world. A city becomes real once you see how its streets are laid out."

COMMENTARY: Now that's what I call beautiful maps of the real world. I hope we will finally be able to see images of Area 51 and Dulce, New Mexico. Maybe we'll be able to pickup images of UFO's or E.T. himself.